Bittensor is an open-source platform for creating and trading digital commodities such as machine intelligence, storage, and compute power. Users are rewarded in TAO tokens for contributing competitive resources.
Bittensor was founded by Jacob Robert Steeves and Ala Shaabana to build a decentralized market for the production of machine intelligence. According to third-party CBInsights, Bittensor was founded in 2019, though Steeves LinkedIn states he has worked on Bittensor since March 2016.
In January 2021, Opentensor Foundation launched the first iteration of Subtensor called “Kusanagi.” In May 2021, Opentensor Foundation halted Kusanagi “to address a few early issues with consensus.” In November 2021, Kusanagi was forked and launched under the name “Nakamoto.” Notably, and according to third-party taostats, 546,113 TAO (~2.61% of the total token supply) previously mined on Kusanagi were migrated to Nakamoto. The testnet version of “Finney” launched on Jan. 10, 2023, to test key network upgrades, including the release of subnets and delegated staking. On March 20, 2023, Nakamoto was forked to Finney mainnet “to address a few performance issues in the network’s kernel code,” and remains as the live version of Subtensor.
On March 28, 2023, Opentensor Foundation announced the release of Chattensor, a large language model (LLM) built on Bittensor. On July 24, 2023, Opentensor Foundation announced the release of the Bittensor Language Model (BTLM). As a “3 billion parameter language model,” BTLM is designed to be compatible with mobile devices by requiring significantly less memory to store than popular 7 billion and 10 billion parameter models like OpenAI’s GPT-3 and Meta’s LLaMA. On Aug. 7, 2023, Opentensor Foundation announced it had executed its first incentivized pre-training model using GPT-2 on Bittensor’s testnet. On Oct. 2, 2023, subnets went live on Finney, allowing users to create incentive mechanisms for specific types of machine learning tasks, such as generating images, creating music, or scraping and indexing the internet.
Subtensor, Bittensor’s blockchain built using Polkadot’s Substrate SDK is live and producing blocks. A commercially reasonable search found that Bittensor has 32 subnets (the existing maximum), though four show no forms of activity. These subnets are experimenting with many use cases, such as text generation, machine translation, internet scraping, image generation, storage, and music generation.
